In case you haven't given a look at Brian Rinaldi's Illudium PU-36, do yourself a favor and do so. Out of the box, using a nice Flex front end, it introspects your database and can build concrete CFCs for your data model. Where Illudium goes so much further than some other CFC generators I have used is that it not only builds nice Bean, DAO, and Gateway objects (Foo.cfc, FooDAO.cfc, FooGateway.cfc), but it also builds in a service layer by adding in a nice FooService.

For those that caught my mini-presentation to the DFWCFUG before Mark Drew's CFEclipse presentation on Tuesday night, I took a basic procedural code application and modified it so that all database interaction was managed through objects.   After the meeting for the ones that stayed around, I proceeded to take that application and turn it into a Mach-II application.

As if we don't all Mark a big enough debt of gratitude for his tireless work on CFEclipse, he took the time to present on it to the DFWCFUG on Tuesday night.....at 1:00AM his time!!!   He was very gracious in doing so and I just wanted to pass along a public thanks from all 22 people we had in attendance that night.

Before I head out of town, I thought I should post the results of the billable hourly rates survey I posted earlier in the week.  As of this writing, 81 people filled out the survey.  Here are the general findings, which include both freelancers and full-time consultants that do billable work for their companies.  I was hoping to break it down a bit more but I honestly don't have time before I get out of town.

In the comments of Ben Forta's rebuttal to the ComputerWorld article that listed ColdFusion as one of 10 dead computer skills, I noticed that a few people made mention of an increase in billable rates in recent years. I have also found this to be true, and thought it might be interesting to create an unofficial survey of billable rates by U.S. CFML developers. I put together a survey at the newly revamped and exceptionally slower-than-before SurveyMonkey.

Who says that stalking an open source project doesn't pay off??? As Peter Farrell mentioned on his blog, I am one of 3 new official members of the Mach-II team. Kurt Wiersma has been involved heavily for some time as a code contributor, and is now officially a part of the team. Kyle Hayes is the new Media Designer and has built a sweet new site for the project that will be released soon. I am the official _________ of the team.

At cf.Objective() this past weekend, I was able to con Mark Mandel out of a copy of his introductory presentation on Transfer ORM, knowing that I was going to present on that very topic at tonight's DWFCFUG meeting. I have posted a zip file containing the Power Point file (only very slightly modified by me), in addition to a SQL backup file of the database, and code used in the example applications.

Wow! Peter, Kurt, and Matt have been busting some tail! Today I skipped a session-and-a-half to sit and chat with Peter Farrell about what they have been working on. I am *very* impressed. I feel fortunate to have had this chance to see a bit of a preview of the session, since I am not sure I could have taken it all in in the 1-hour slot that he had to present it in.

I am sitting in the CFEclipse session by Mark Drew and he has just announced a COOL new feature! Project:Unity is a new feature in CFEclipse that allows you to browse an outline view of almost all ColdFusion framework XML files including MachII, Model Glue, Fusebox, ColdSpring, Transfer, Reactor (and maybe others that I missed!) As you click down through the human-view and you select an element, it opens the config file and goes directly to that node.

I am posting this entry live from the Adobe kickoff presentation by Jason Delmore, who is the product manager for ColdFusion for Adobe, at cf.Objective().  Obviously this has been rumored for a long time, but Jason just publicly announced that CFTHREAD is in ColdFusion Scorpio!